Thursday, April 25, 2013

'So He Takes the Dog' by Jonathan Buckley

25 April 2013I had not
heard of the author Jonathan Buckley before reading a piece about him The
Guardian a few weeks ago which described his 2006 novel ‘So He Takes the Dog’
as a masterpiece. Intrigued I got hold of the unabridged audio recording of the
book (narrated by Richard Burnip). It’s an interesting novel which tells a
relatively straightforward tale in a slightly odd way. ‘So He Takes the Dog’ recounts
a murder investigation in a small North Devon town. It is more of a police
procedural than a murder mystery. We follow the detectives as they piece
together a picture of the life of a homeless man whose body is found on the beach.
Searching backwards through the dead man’s life to understand how he came to be
homeless and the origins of his odd behaviour reminded me of ‘Stuart: A Life
Backwards’ by Alexander Masters (reviewed here in August 2010). As the novel
progresses, however, you begin to wonder whether it is really about the murder
or whether the main story is that of the police officer narrating the tale. And
I gradually realised that the odd tone (possibly even more noticeable in the
audio version) was due to the fact that his first person narration seems to
deliberately avoid ever using the words “I” or “me”. The police officer tells
us his name and is happy to refer to himself and his colleague as “we” but
never talks about himself in the first person. I began to suspect that this was
going to prove incredibly significant but, unless I missed something, we are
never told why he has chosen to tell the story in this odd way. I’m not sure I
would call ‘So He Takes the Dog’ a masterpiece but I enjoyed reading it.

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About Me

Since September 2005 Robin Simpson has been Chief Executive of Voluntary Arts, which provides a universal voice for approximately 63,000 voluntary arts groups, across the UK and Ireland, involving more than 10 million participants in creative cultural activities. A keen amateur French horn player, Robin is currently a member of the Northampton Symphony Orchestra. Robin is a perennial ballroom dancing student, a frequent theatre-goer, an enthusiastic reader of contemporary fiction, an insatiable consumer of classical and world music and a keen blogger at www.culturalplayingfield.org and www.culturaldessert.blogspot.com